Having been bitten this week by a couple of shapefiles with broken
geometry, I did a bit of searching for code that can fix up these kind
of errors - you know, where adjacent polygons aren't quite adjacent,
or there's slivers or other junk.
I found this C++ implementation:
http://www.gdmc.nl:8000/pprepair
which looks quite capable. Anyone interesting in hooking it up to
SpatialPolygons?
There's a python implementation of something similar mentioned here:
http://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXVIII/part2/Papers/24_Paper.pdf
but I think I might just leave that to my QGIS colleagues....
Barry